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I don’t know an awful lot about how to create montages so I found this guide on some handy tips to keep in mind. It’s more orientated to artistic editing or advertising footage but it’s made us rethink what camera angles and shot we have, we’re also think that editing may become a large part of our animation so possibly we may need to render out the beginning early and started editing it.

Tips to keep in mind

Pay attention to where the eyes of the viewer are.

Have similar Colour palettes and exposures within the shots

Use the beat of the music

Create resemblances, with the types of objects and the flow of movement

We have been looking at a lot of montage videos, it’s been really useful to see the shots that are used and even what sort of equipment the characters are arming themselves with, not that our character would have guns and rocket launchers but I feel if it’s similar objects it would more easily suggest to the audience that it is a type of weapon.

I remembered about this old teaser for the Incredibles film, it’s interesting how they give you the history of the character with the news clippings, I also love how they introduced humor.

We kinda have a basic idea of what our story is so onto Storyboarding!

I wanted to quickly draw out the structure of our story and messed about with it on imovie, I wanted to see it could be coherently told within the time frame or what sort changes we might need to make to it.

I made some slight story changes, the beginning is quite clear with what happens though once it gets to the confrontation with the spider, it’s not so clear what movement we should have. I think it something better planned out in 3d previs.

Sarah brought up the idea that our character could have a daughter. This would be giving our character motive for facing off with the spider, perhaps it’s in the daughter bedroom and she’s also scared of spiders. Another possibility could be that the daughter actually really likes bugs (the spider could be her escaped pet) and she’s the one that saves the dad from the spider instead.

Some design done by Sarah

and some design done by Rose

I do like the inclusion of the daughter but given the time frame we have to work with I’m not so sure it’d work to introduce her into it. We’re going to draw out some more concepts and think of some storyboards, see what we can make.

For the next part of this module I’ve been placed into a group with Rose, Sarah and Bradley, where we have to make a 40 second animation based of the theme Bravery.

from the assignment brief;

“Teams will need to balance the to start of 3D previs production against the need to give idealization,conceptualization, and planning enough time and energy to evolve. It’s important to remember animation is a radio play with pictures – think early on about how sound will balance your pace and and impact the appeal & emotion of your work.

Design ideas to consider:Literal or figurative interpretations for the animation visuals. Look to push genre, narrative, character and art in different ways. Use design thinking processes to work through problems and unknowns.Pre-rendered or realtime rendering as an output, or 360 video design etc”

We brainstormed quite a few ideas

Someone finding the courage to tell their crush their feelings

A kid facing up to their bully’s

A social issue perhaps like a trans kid deciding to be open about who they are.

A kid afraid to skateboard but tries it anyway and breaks his arm, but doesn’t let that deter them and keeps trying

A kid thinking ‘ a monster in his room but it turns out to be they’re teddy bear

A nightlight being scared of the dark and overcoming that when they see they help others not be scared of the dark as well.

Some of these ideas we felt were being a too obvious response to the theme or may be too complicated to really tell within the time frame, particularly the ideas about social issues. We tended to stay away from truly serious ideas and knew that we wanted a story that was lighthearted and played on how we ourselves view scary situations, basically a juxtaposition between our character thinking something was scary when it really wasn’t.

The idea we’ve decided to work on is about a man gearing up really dramatically with loads of equipment, then entering a room with a really eerie atmosphere, only for the audience to discover that he’s facing off against a spider. The atmosphere changes as the man flails about and struggles to capture the spider, when he finally does catch it he puts it outside. When the man is back inside though we can see another spider crawling onto his shoulder and it would end with the man about to scream.

I like this idea and how it plays off a persons on perception of how serious a situation is, being scared of spiders myself, I can be self ware of how silly I look when I’m trying to deal with them. Bravery to me is knowing that you’re scared of something and choosing to face it anyway and I believe this story nicely portrays that idea in a fun lighthearted way.

The pace of these assignments is a lot faster than last year, I feel more capable to deal with the challenges whilst still feeling I could do so much more. My team seemed to jump straight into the modelling project which was great, once we had our idea and narrative down we quickly started making our assets. I enjoyed the Harem setting it’s not like anything I would have attempted before and it brought up a lot of opportunities to model a large variety of objects from pillows to lantern chandeliers. I feel as a team we all worked well in tandem with each other, bouncing around ideas and trying to solve the issue we were running into, there’s still so much I see that we can do with it if time weren’t a factor.

We also had the walk cycle and body mechanic, I’m quite interested in animating I had fun with it last year in our short animation and for me this assignment has been about learning how to create a good workflow, I found it easy to get lost in key frames and movements but towards the end I started to grasp more how to streamline what movements I was making and how to tweak the keyframes I had instead of adding more. I understand that I need to improve my process of creating so in the future I can add the extra detailing and finish things to own desired standards.

Having our scene complied together and waiting on rendering out our video I decided to try some lighting within our scene. This is mainly because I modeled the lanterns in the scene and I wanted to see what sort of atmosphere I could create with them.

I watched this tutorial and a few others as an introduction to lights, I’ve used lights before but only in an experimental way and not being overly sure of what I was doing.

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Some of my first attempts using point lights, spotlights, and area lights. They came out extremely dark, or at least darker than what they looked liked in the render view, which is disappointing as I was quite happy with how it looked. This version actually crashed and I was able to save so all the lights were deleted and I had to begin gain, though this isn’t all bad, it was taking a long time for these images to render out and since they’re not what I hoped it’s not much of a loss, except the lanterns which had taken some time.

These are my next experiments with lights, I had these spotlights coming in through the window which I liked, almost like moonlight shining in. The timing for our Courtesans escape isn’t actually something we’d thought through incredibly, I imagined it in the middle of the night (hence the above stills being so dark) whilst Charlotte imagined it at Dawn, so I kinda took that on board and made the whole scene brighter, change moonlight into a sunrise. I didn’t have time to do more lights with the lanterns but it’s definitely something I’ll return to, possibly even model some candles.